Man endeavors to find answers. Over the ages, bards, books, schools, and churches have existed in large part to provide those answers. Recently, another source of answers has become preeminent: the search engine. By providing a selected set of web pages that are relevant to a user query, the search engine gives the testimony of the past and allows access to new discoveries in every field. But even with the ability to propose highly relevant web content as answers to user questions, some questions remain unanswered. Often these are highly specific questions that only a handful of people have ever asked. For example, a user may seek to know if anyone else has had the same problem with a television of a certain model number and, if so, to find out what they did about it. Even when the results returned by search engines do provide answers, the user often must wade through many duplicative, unrelated, and otherwise unhelpful search results to discover those answers. Reviewing these many results to discover an answer can be time consuming and frustrating.
Further, in seeking answers, we often aren't alone. Similar queries are submitted by many users, and each of these users may process similar results to the similar queries differently based on differing backgrounds, differing result selections, or other differing traits or behaviors. Search engines do not enable users to benefit from each others' search activities, however. Complementary knowledge is not shared and efforts are duplicated. Rather than helping users work together to quickly find answers, search engines are designed for seekers to struggle alone.